2019-01-21T07:52:29Z"The Biggest Con in History": American Myth-Making in the Stage and Screen Adaptations of Anastasiahttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21399
"The Biggest Con in History": American Myth-Making in the Stage and Screen Adaptations of Anastasia
Weyman, Jennifer Elizabeth
The story of Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova has been engrained in the American imagination for nearly a century. This tale has often been told on stage and screen, depicting Anastasia and her most famous impersonator: Anna Anderson. The adaptation of Anna and Anastasia’s tale that has made the most lasting impact is the 1951 French play, Anastasia, by Marcelle Maurette, and its 1954 English translation by Guy Bolton. Four more adaptations have followed that progenitor play: the 1956 film, Anastasia; the 1965 operetta, Anya; the 1997 animated film, Anastasia; and the 2017 musical, Anastasia. These five artistic adaptations evolved from one another, navigating their own history alongside changing American values. This thesis situates each production within American sociopolitics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, revealing how each production is far more indicative of American ideals than Russian history, particularly with regards to immigration, foreign policy, and feminism.
2018-01-01T00:00:00ZIsle of Gold - a story in musichttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21395
Isle of Gold - a story in music
Samson, Matthew David Arling
Out of the great abundance of stories available to humans throughout history, opera composers and their librettists have favored a surprisingly small subset of these stories in the production of their works. Thus, a significant amount of very interesting subject matter has remained largely unexplored by the compositional community. One such seldom attempted story is Plato’s tale of Atlantis, both its existence and its fall. At present, only a small handful of composers have attempted large scale musico-dramatic works dealing with the legend, and arguably none of these works have taken hold in the greater operatic canon, if they are even known in the first place. Despite its neglect, this particular legend, which depicts the conflict of an idealized primal state with one ruined by arrogance and both of their eventual destructions by catastrophe, is ripe for interpretation.
This work is an attempt to begin to begin to address the story’s neglect. My focus in exploring the topic and composing this stage piece has been foremost on the idea of repetition, and key to that exploration has been the use of carefully structured anachronism. Symbolically, Atlantis can be made to function as a stand-in for nearly any powerful nation or empire in nearly any time period. As such, textually, “the Isle” as it is called in the piece, is ostensibly placed in the distant past; however, there are textual elements that problematize this assumption, such that it could indeed be set in the distant future or even as a continuously repeating event, removed from the normal workings of time.
Similarly, the orchestration consists of essentially only instruments present in an early baroque orchestra, and while they are generally asked to play in a conventionally baroque style, the harmonic, melodic, and formal material is decidedly contemporary. Furthermore, from time to time, both the instruments and voices are asked to perform techniques and in styles borrowed from many different times and places.
All these elements and others taken together serve to underscore the universality and timelessness of the tale, especially highlighting its relevance to the modern world and our place in it.
2018-01-01T00:00:00ZVOCAL LYRICISM IN THE VOICE OF THE VIOLAhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21393
VOCAL LYRICISM IN THE VOICE OF THE VIOLA
Shohdy, Valentina Alaaledin
This dissertation performance project explores how the interpretation of instrumental music can be influenced and informed by the vocal repertoire of various composers throughout music history. The first recital draws comparisons in compositional style by pairing an instrumental work with a piece of vocal chamber music by the same composer. The first pairing includes two pieces by Johannes Brahms; Zwei Gesänge for Alto Voice, Viola, and Piano, Op. 91 and Sonata in E flat Major for Viola and Piano, Op. 120, No. 2, while the second pairing features two pieces by Frank Bridge; Three Songs for Medium Voice, Viola, and Piano and Allegro appassionato and Pensiero for Viola and Piano.
The second recital considers how text can inform phrasing and other aspects of interpretation with transcriptions for the viola that were originally written for voice. The first half of the recital features two songs by John Dowland, Flow My Tears and If My Complaints Could Passions Move, which influenced Benjamin Britten to write his Lachrymae, reflections on a song of Dowland for Viola and Piano, Op. 48. The second half of the recital introduces the music of Franz Schubert, first with his Sonata in A minor, “Arpeggione”, for Viola and Piano, D. 821, followed by four songs, Wanderers Nachtlied, D. 768, Die Forelle, D. 550, Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531, and Ständchen, D. 957, which later influenced him to write several of his instrumental works.
The third recital presents works that were directly inspired by the vocal styles of various cultures and religions around the world. The first half explores the cantorial style of the Hebrew tradition as interpreted through works of two Jewish composers; Joseph Joachim’s Hebrew Melodies On Poems of Byron for Viola and Piano, Op. 9 and Ernest Bloch’s Suite Hébraïque for Viola and Piano. The second half begins with the evolving style of twentieth-century France with Charles Martin Loeffler’s Quatre Poëmes for Mezzo Soprano, Viola, and Piano, Op. 5, and ends with a snapshot of Russian culture represented by Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14, a song originally written for voice without text.
2018-01-01T00:00:00ZMARKED FOR CONSCIOUSNESS: ACCENT SYMBOLS AS AN INTERPRETIVE TOOL IN SCHUMANN’S DUO WORKS WITH PIANOhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21389
MARKED FOR CONSCIOUSNESS: ACCENT SYMBOLS AS AN INTERPRETIVE TOOL IN SCHUMANN’S DUO WORKS WITH PIANO
Langlois, Michael
Robert Schumann’s duo works with piano contain a wide and varied assortment of accent markings. Most of these accents are represented by five different symbols: fp, sf, a one-note hairpin, a wedge, and circumflex. The number of these symbols, particularly in the violin sonatas, represents a considerable amount of instruction to the performer and presents an interpretive problem: with so many intensity markings bearing down on the phrases and threatening to tear apart the form, how can the performer render an organic whole? How can so many notes be accented? These details have much to tell the performer about a composition when the interpreter shifts from a quantitative approach (“How much accentuation?”) to a qualitative approach (“What is this accent doing here?”). Whereas one potential model for interpreting accent markings might scale Schumann’s five signs by intensity from the fortepiano at the lowest to the sforzando at the highest, we suggest here that accents may instead be classified by whether they articulate the boundaries of a phrase, underscore its melodic shape, highlight a syncopation, a significant harmonic event, reveal form, foreshadow a later event, or set up a central tension. In the process of such classification, the investigation of a marking may invite questions about the character of a theme, the communication of a structural framework, and what means are at the performer’s disposal for rendering a given accent marking. Such insight serves to strengthen interpretive conviction.
This dissertation project’s performance component comprised three recitals: on February 24, 2017, Schumann’s Violin Sonata no. 1, Liederkreis op. 39, and Fantasiestücke op. 73 with Lydia Chernicoff (violin), Tanya Langlois (mezzo-soprano), and Emily Robinson (clarinet); on October 20, 2017, the Adagio and Allegro for Horn, Liederkreis op. 24, and Dichterliebe op. 39 with Avery Pettigrew (horn), Tanya Langlois (mezzo-soprano), and Gran Wilson (tenor); on March 10, 2018, Violin Sonatas nos. 2 and 3 with Elizabeth Adams (violin). The recitals were performed at the University of Maryland’s Gildenhorn and Ulrich Recital Halls. The recitals are available on compact discs which can be found in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM).
2018-01-01T00:00:00Z